I’ve been to many conferences, but had yet to visit
NCECA. I had previously followed the 2010 Philadelphia conference through crafthaus’s emerging
artist blog and, similarly, this year, both crafthaus and NCECA will have blogs
updating soon here and here.

Rather than try and recap the entire event, I thought I’d
hit some highlights that connect back to HCCC and Houston.
Besides, NCECA will be in Houston in 2013, and it’s important to draw
connections and let folks in on the dirty little secret: Houston and its “walkable-museum-district” is great, despite what people say about the traffic.

One of my first stops at NCECA was the Bellevue Arts
Museum (BAM) for the exhibition PushPlay: The NCECA 2012 Invitational. The exhibit features work by 35
different artists loosely organized around a theme of play that is not always full
of “fun and games.” The first work I viewed immediately brought up thoughts of
Houston. As the fourth largest city in the nation, Houston is home to more than
5,000 energy-related firms and touted by the City of Houston as the EnergyCapital of the world.
Created while they were artists-in-residence
at the Kohler Company, Sarah Lindley and Norwood Viviano’s Kohler Diptych responds to early American industry, and the BAM
label describes how “the artists combine industrial technologies such as rapid
prototyping, slip casting, and factory production with play technologies such
as staging and the miniature to reference notions of dependence, control and
consequence.” (Footnote 1)

Besides the NCECA
2012: Invitational, BAM had two other
great exhibitions on the third floor. DirkStaschke: Falling Feels a Lot Like Flying featured the lavish ceramic work of Dirk Staschke, winner of the John and Joyce
Price Award of Excellence at the BAM Biennial
2010: Clay Throwdown! In the same floor just around the corner, Nora
Atkinson curated Making Mends, a group exhibit of artists who expand
on the therapeutic benefits of art. (Nora wrote a guest blog post for us in the
past on the traveling exhibit, Lisa
Gralnick: The Gold Standard, which you can find here and here.

A great thing about the NCECA conference is the number of
exhibitions throughout the city and surrounding area devoted to ceramics,
including around 30 exhibitions at the Seattle Design Center. One of the
exhibitions featured a new piece by Janice Jakielski titled Sweet Melancholia and the Case for Infinite
Sadness.

I was excited to see Janice’s work in person, as she will
be having a solo exhibition at HCCC in January of 2013 that will be up through
the Houston NCECA conference that year. Through her mixed-media approach,
incorporating wall decorations, textiles, and ceramics, Jakielski seeks to
engage the viewer in new ways of seeing and sometimes disrupting our
understanding. Here, the white ceramic flowers are overlaid with a colorful
embroidery hoop. Looking through the
mesh, the colors overlap the white forms but, from the side, we see the
illusion at play.

The conference itself took place at the Washington
Convention Center and had a variety of lectures, panel discussions, and
demonstrations. Former CraftTexas
artist, Marianne McGrath,
was a co-curator of the Projects Space described as having conceptual and
material conversation, taking the artists “beyond the confines of their kiln.”
This included a performance by The Brick Factory,
a performance-art collective of artists: Summer Zickefoose, Nicole Burisch, Tom Myers,
and Erik Scollon. The four met last summer at Actions + Material, A Watershed
Center for the Ceramic Arts residency, and a shared interest in ceramics and
performance art prompted the creation of this group.

The Brick Factory re-stage of Jim Mechert’s 1972
performance, Changes, but with a musicaladdition—hopefully, a video will come soon to their blog http://thebrickfactory.tumblr.com/

In thinking of performances and happenings, I allowed
myself a night out in Seattle and attended SPROUT.SPROUT
is a local grassroots event centered on a community dinner that funds emerging
artists through a vote. In this case, there were six different artists and
projects proposed throughout the evening, with the final vote being cast in
support of Celeste Cooning’s cut-paper workshop, Cut It Out. It
was inspirational to see community support of emerging artists and different
projects, all of which can be viewed on their website,
and this prompted me to begin thinking about how an event like this could take
root in Houston.

SPROUT
volunteers in preparation for the dinner, a photo from their website

A poster from the event as photographed by me.

Directly following my NCECA travels, I came back to
Houston and quickly continued the ceramic adventure with a second act in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana.

Clare is a British artist and currently a research fellow
at the University of Westminster. She’s known for working in clay, often
creating or staging large-scale installations that are site specific. At LSU,
she was engaging with the entire ceramics department in making 1,000 bowls. She
described how the project is exploring the reasons behind making through the
act of making. For two weeks, the department will work on this one task and
document the process through a blog, which you can find here.

After a full week of viewing ceramics from the West Coast
to the banks of the Mississippi, I’m overwhelmed by the visuals that keep
resurfacing in my head. It will be exciting for Houston to host NCECA next
year, and I look forward to more visits to LSU, Baton Rouge, and the great
state of Louisiana (though I guess I have to say not as great as Texas). I’ll
leave you with two final images linking Baton Rouge to Seattle.